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Mobile madness

June 26, 2012

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By: Alex Aspinall

Head of content

MVF

Mobile adoption is currently in a very interesting place. We are quickly approaching the point where having no mobile plan means you are behind the times. At the moment, unless you’re a huge media company, you can pretty much still get away with having a mobile presence that is essentially a version of your desktop site that renders properly and doesn’t have hover states.

But if you look at your mobile user statistics, and then at the predictions for how quickly mobile browsing is set to grow, you soon realise that getting away with this bare minimum is soon not going to be a viable options for successful brands.

Earlier this year, Cisco released a whitepaper that captured the imagination of mobile and data geeks around the world. It predicted that between 2011 and 2016 we should be expecting mobile data traffic to increase 18-fold. Admittedly it is hard to predict exactly how many extra mobile views your website will receive as a result. But even at current levels, mobile traffic is more than doubling year-on-year. It will not be long before 25 per cent of your user visits are being made on mobile devices (maybe they already are?).

Unless those visitors are greeted by streamlined mobile sites, where information is quickly obtainable, they won’t be hanging around. We’re slowly becoming used to expecting our mobile experience to be tailor-made. And as time goes by this expectation will grow. People are not going to be willing to scroll around searching for content, as they would were they sat at a desktop. Information needs to be easily accessible, instantly. It should probably even be personalised.

So if you don’t have a solid mobile strategy in place, now is definitely the time to act. Just one caveat: don’t rush out and make an app. You probably don’t need one (yet).